COGNITIVE CONTROL FOR MOBILE SERVICE ROBOTS NICK HAWES UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM The technology underlying mobile robots has matured to the level where basic operations in static, or controlled, environments can almost be taken for granted. To make mobile robots useful as service platforms (i.e. performing tasks with or for humans in everyday environments), we now must develop approaches that exploit the structure of human environments (both static and dynamic) in order to create more intelligent, and therefore more useful, robots. With this aim in mind, this talk will present recent work on the application of a range of AI techniques to mobile robotics, including probabilistic reasoning for object search, goal generation and planning for exploration, qualitative reasoning about human environments, and learning the best routes to take through populated spaces. BIO Dr. Nick Hawes is a Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Robotics at the University of Birmingham School of Computer Science and the coordinator of the STRANDS project (Spatio-Temporal Representations and Activities for Cognitive Control in Long-Term Scenarios), a 4-year EU FP7 Integrating Project. He is a member of the Intelligent Robotics Lab in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Before this he was part of the Common Sense group at Media Lab Europe, sponsored by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, which he joined after completing a Ph.D. with Professor Aaron Sloman at the University of Birmingham. He has worked on information-processing architectures for intelligent systems, the integration of AI planning techniques into a variety of robot systems, and the use of qualitative spatial representations to enable robots to reason about the possibilities for action in their worlds.